S7-EP8: The Underneath Place: Craig Meriwether on Hypnotherapy and Hidden Trauma

What does it teach you when a city rises from nothing… and then vanishes on purpose?
Doyle is joined by guest co-hosts Howie and Russ for a wide-ranging conversation with Sarah Marshall, author of Playa Dust in My Soul, a novel that drops you into Burning Man through seven distinct characters and a fully lived, 360-degree view of the Playa.
Sarah unpacks the deeper philosophy beneath the spectacle: radical self-reliance, the gift economy, participation without an audience, and how impermanence reshapes identity. We talk community and chosen family, what it means to “export” your most authentic self into everyday life, and why so many people return to the Playa year after year.
Sarah also reads an excerpt from the opening of her book, grounding us in dust, freedom, discipline, and the strange tenderness of starting over. Then we close with a question that lingers: if all the roles and identities fell away tomorrow, who would remain in the dust?
Learn more about Sarah and Playa Dust in My Soul at: playaadustinmysoul.com
Spirit Talk Show – Bedtime Stories for Grown-UpsHosted by Doyle Follow Spirit Talk Show on social media:Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/spirittalkshowInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/doylespirittalkshow/X: https://x.com/doylespirittalk Tumblr: https://www.tumblr.com/blog/spirittalkshow www.spirittalkshow.info  If this episode resonated with you, please subscribe, rate, and share it with someone who might need it.Sponsored by Incogni — they remove your personal data from broker sites automatically so strangers cannot buy your information. Get protected: https://deal.incogni.io/spirittalkshow 

In this deeply moving episode of Spirit Talk Show, Doyle sits down with Devorah Brinckerhoff for a powerful conversation about grief, trauma, creativity, and the quiet courage it takes to face the parts of ourselves we were taught to hide.
Devorah shares how her work with Soul Portraits was born not from theory, but from survival—through loss, family rupture, profound betrayal, and the long process of reclaiming identity after trauma. What emerged was a creative healing practice that helps people transform letters, photographs, journals, and other personal artifacts into visual expressions of truth, memory, and becoming.
Together, Doyle and Devorah explore what it means to carry pain in the body, why traditional talking sometimes is not enough, how objects can hold emotional energy, and why healing is not about erasing the past but transforming our relationship to it. They also talk about shame, self-worth, grief, inner wisdom, and the surprising power of making something with your own hands when words no longer reach deep enough.
This is a conversation about the stories we carry, the identities we outgrow, and the possibility of meeting ourselves with more compassion than judgment.
A soulful, vulnerable, and unforgettable episode for anyone who has ever wondered whether broken pieces can still become something beautiful.
Learn more about Devorah Brinckerhoff and Soul Portraits:https://soulportrait.art/
Spirit Talk Show – Bedtime Stories for Grown-UpsHosted by Doyle Follow Spirit Talk Show on social media:Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/spirittalkshowInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/doylespirittalkshow/X: https://x.com/doylespirittalk Tumblr: https://www.tumblr.com/blog/spirittalkshow www.spirittalkshow.info  If this episode resonated with you, please subscribe, rate, and share it with someone who might need it.Sponsored by Incogni — they remove your personal data from broker sites automatically so strangers cannot buy your information. Get protected: https://deal.incogni.io/spirittalkshow 

Mike Balaban didn't set out to be a historian. He was a closeted Wall Street banker who drove across America in 1978 with a dog-eared copy of the Bob Dameron guide, a yellow legal pad, and a camera — stopping at every gay bar between New York and San Diego, writing reviews in the margins of his own life. He took photos he thought no one else would ever want. He kept diary entries that could have cost him everything. He put it all in a box.
Decades later, he opened that box. And what he found was all of us.
In this episode, Mike talks about what it cost to survive in a world that was actively trying to erase you, the summer in San Diego that taught him how to be gay, a bartender named Beau who became his home and then his grief, and why the real LGBTQ history isn't just Stonewall and Harvey Milk — it's the man at the edge of the parade, shaking, camera raised, hoping nobody from the office walks by.
We also talk about his upcoming book The Accidental Gay Historian, his community archive at BAMMER.co, and why he believes that if you don't write your own history, you get written out of it.
He told me he was just keeping things for himself. I don't believe him.
Find Mike at BAMMER.co and @bamer47 on Instagram and YouTube. His podcast is Bama and Me.
Spirit Talk Show – Bedtime Stories for Grown-UpsHosted by Doyle Follow Spirit Talk Show on social media:Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/spirittalkshowInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/doylespirittalkshow/X: https://x.com/doylespirittalk Tumblr: https://www.tumblr.com/blog/spirittalkshow www.spirittalkshow.info  If this episode resonated with you, please subscribe, rate, and share it with someone who might need it.Sponsored by Incogni — they remove your personal data from broker sites automatically so strangers cannot buy your information. Get protected: https://deal.incogni.io/spirittalkshow 

He spent four years at the Air Force Academy. Twenty years flying fighter aircraft. Fifteen years at NORAD, the command responsible for watching the skies over all of North America. Thirty-nine years of vigilance, discipline, and mission. And when the uniform finally came off, the silence was deafening.
So Terrence Rotering sat down and wrote 5,000 pages in two years.
Eleven books. A trilogy of trilogies plus two. An epic saga called The Chronicles of Trinith that braids together fantasy, science fiction, and spiritual warfare into a single unified world — one that keeps expanding with every book he finishes. He has been compared to Tolkien for foundational mythos, to C.S. Lewis for moral imagination, to Asimov and Herbert for the scale of his science fiction. That is heavy company. But what makes Terrence's work different from anyone he is compared to is something he calls unfencing the fiction. He does not believe the spiritual war in his books stays politely inside the covers. He believes it walks out into the living world and finds you.
In this episode, Terrence talks about what nearly four decades of military service does to a person's sense of purpose, what it felt like when that purpose suddenly went quiet, the God-winks that convinced him this story was bigger than he planned, and the one word he carries into every morning: SMILE. Service. Mission. Intentionality. Legacy. Eternity.
He also makes one thing clear that Frodo had a ring and Harry had a wand. You have something else entirely. And it may be more than enough.
Find Terrence at chroniclesoftrinian.com.
Spirit Talk Show – Bedtime Stories for Grown-UpsHosted by Doyle Follow Spirit Talk Show on social media:Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/spirittalkshowInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/doylespirittalkshow/X: https://x.com/doylespirittalk Tumblr: https://www.tumblr.com/blog/spirittalkshow www.spirittalkshow.info  If this episode resonated with you, please subscribe, rate, and share it with someone who might need it.Sponsored by Incogni — they remove your personal data from broker sites automatically so strangers cannot buy your information. Get protected: https://deal.incogni.io/spirittalkshow 

In this extended episode of Spirit Talk Show, Doyle sits down with award-winning author Gerald Everett Jones for a wide-ranging conversation about writing, publishing, Hollywood, history, and what success really means for a working storyteller.
Gerald reflects on his journey from nonfiction and technical writing to fiction, screenwriting, and historical novels, sharing hard-won insight into the realities of traditional publishing, self-publishing, book promotion, and the often painful gap between creating a story and watching the industry reshape it.
The conversation also explores Gerald’s upcoming novel Jonathan’s Journal, a work of historical fiction inspired by a real World War I diary and expanded into a deeper story of memory, geopolitics, loss, and human connection. Along the way, Doyle and Gerald dive into film adaptations, streaming culture, the power of long-form storytelling, and why legacy may matter more than fame.
This is an episode about craft, survival, reinvention, and the long game of creative work.
Learn more about Gerald Everett Jones and his books:https://geraldeverettjones.com/
Spirit Talk Show – Bedtime Stories for Grown-UpsHosted by Doyle Follow Spirit Talk Show on social media:Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/spirittalkshowInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/doylespirittalkshow/X: https://x.com/doylespirittalk Tumblr: https://www.tumblr.com/blog/spirittalkshow www.spirittalkshow.info  If this episode resonated with you, please subscribe, rate, and share it with someone who might need it.Sponsored by Incogni — they remove your personal data from broker sites automatically so strangers cannot buy your information. Get protected: https://deal.incogni.io/spirittalkshow 

He was in the pub with Rowan Atkinson when John Cleese called. He watched Rick Mayal and Adrian Edmondson do their very first television appearance. He stood at the back of an empty auditorium the night Stefan Grappelli made a seasoned guitarist stop mid-conversation just to watch. He was there for so much of it — the golden age of British comedy, the writers' rooms, the charity stages, the moments that became television history.
And then, decades later, he sat down alone one night to play a role-playing game with twenty-four strangers across the world. And thought: what would it really be like to actually be this guy?
That question became a novel. Then a series. Then four books.
Richard Sparks has had two full creative lives, and he is not finished with either of them. In this conversation, he talks about what it meant to write for some of the most iconic voices in British comedy, what the room was really like when Rowan Atkinson switched on, the night he watched Robin Williams hold thirty people in physical pain from laughing, and why the most important thing he ever did for his career was quit the safe job he hated two weeks after signing on for another year.
He also reads live from his New Rock series — a chapter so quietly constructed that it gives you the answer to everything in chapter nine, and you don't realize what you've been handed until much later.
His advice to every young writer listening: learn the melody before you give anyone the riff. And never try to write like somebody else. It took him decades to prove that with his own work. He's still proving it.
Find Richard at richardsparks.com and the New Rock series wherever books are sold.
Spirit Talk Show – Bedtime Stories for Grown-UpsHosted by Doyle Follow Spirit Talk Show on social media:Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/spirittalkshowInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/doylespirittalkshow/X: https://x.com/doylespirittalk Tumblr: https://www.tumblr.com/blog/spirittalkshow www.spirittalkshow.info  If this episode resonated with you, please subscribe, rate, and share it with someone who might need it.Sponsored by Incogni — they remove your personal data from broker sites automatically so strangers cannot buy your information. Get protected: https://deal.incogni.io/spirittalkshow